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We are pleased to introduce the online course “Channel Your Users for Great Experience Design”.

This material is for people involved in creating digital products who want leverage UX insights. This includes anyone with knowledge of their users, whether “designer” or “non-designer” (for example, marketing, communications, operations, etc.)

They will learn powerful ways of thinking about users and applying that knowledge in product design. The course is a balance of concepts and examples, with challenge exercises to practice and reinforce the skills.

This infographic summarizes the course content.

Understanding user goals lets us define functionality and the information needed to meet their goals. When this is done right, the user will say “That’s just what I need”.

Understanding backstories allow us to go beyond generic solutions to a variety of specialised extensions. When this is done right, the user will say “That was insightful”.

Understanding user strategies requires us to present the functionality and information in ways that the user would expect. When this is done right, the user will say “That was straightforward”. Sometimes we can provide a better approach than the user’s expected strategy. When this is done right, the user will say “That was really helpful”.

Understanding problems helps us prevent the user from encountering problems in the first place, or lets us mitigate unavoidable problems. When this is done right, the user will say “They really care about me”.

The course is now open for registration. The first lesson will be available on Tuesday, February 6th, 2018 and then once per week until March 6th, 2018. There is no charge for this course.

Happy New Year, everyone! I wish you all the best for 2018, personally and professionally.

I have a UX New Year’s Resolution to put some of my UX mentoring materials into an online course by the end of January 2018.

I started doing this in 2017 but stalled at the end of the year.

I got new impetus to continue by the sudden death of a dear friend and colleague, Leslie Johnson. Leslie was a UX practitioner extraordinaire, and was known for freely sharing her expertise, especially mentoring up-and-coming colleagues. She always gave her best.

In this spirit, I am making my best UX mentoring materials available on-line (no charge) for readers of my blog and anyone else who might be interested.

There are important lessons here for designing IoT systems and their interfaces.

Good designing!

About UX Puzzles for the Brainy

These puzzles show how, by taking the user’s point of view, we can generate ideas and select the best ones, innovate, avoid pitfalls, and generally make better thought-out user experiences. You can see the full list here http://theinformationartichoke.com/the-list-of-puzzles/

They are a fun way of presenting serious ideas about designing information rich solutions. For a more serious and systematic way, see “Experiencing + Architecting Information” at www.theinformationartichoke.com.

Your challenge this time is to make conversational interface(s) for a smart microwave, maybe stand alone or as part of a smart kitchen. A model conversation between the user and the microwave will help with the design scope, as before, but the requirement for voice interaction will force us to think hard about how to implement each conversational elementhttp://theinformationartichoke.com/wp-content/uploads/UXP-3-challenge.pdf.

By now, you will have designed analogue, digital, and conversational microwave interfaces, and hopefully abstracted some reusable design approaches.

Good designing!

About UX Puzzles for the Brainy

These puzzles show how, by taking the user’s point of view, we can generate ideas and select the best ones, innovate, avoid pitfalls, and generally make better thought-out user experiences. You can see the full list here http://theinformationartichoke.com/the-list-of-puzzles/

They are a fun way of presenting serious ideas about designing information rich solutions. For a more serious and systematic way, see “Experiencing + Architecting Information” at www.theinformationartichoke.com.

These puzzles show how, by taking the user’s point of view, we can generate ideas and select the best ones, innovate, avoid pitfalls, and generally make better thought-out user experiences. You can see the full list here http://theinformationartichoke.com/the-list-of-puzzles/

They are a fun way of presenting serious ideas about designing information rich solutions. For a more serious and systematic way, see “Experiencing + Architecting Information” at www.theinformationartichoke.com.

Here is our response to the UX Puzzle for the Brainy, a microwave makeover. The original puzzle statement with answer pointers can be found here.

Good designing!

About UX Puzzles for the Brainy

These puzzles show how, by taking the user’s point of view, we can generate ideas and select the best ones, innovate, avoid pitfalls, and generally make better thought-out user experiences.

They are a fun way of presenting serious ideas about designing information rich solutions. For a more serious and systematic way, see “Experiencing + Architecting Information” at www.theinformationartichoke.com.

These puzzles are a recreational way to improve your product design chops. Once a week, you will be given a small UX challenge, with pointers on how to approach it.

A few days later, we will publish our response to the challenge. There is no such thing as the “right answer”, just more or less well-thought-out answers. If you disagree with our response, excellent. We are all participants in a design activity, with different points of view for generating and evaluating ideas.

The brainy

You may be experienced or a newbie. You may be a product manager, business analyst, information architect, user experience architect, or visual designer.

You want to grow your skills and make sure that your contribution is relevant and well thought-out from a user point of view.

The scope

We focus on structure and function. We consider users’ goals, strategies and knowledge to get the right foundations and shape for the solution. We do not cover visual treatment, typography, or copy.

UXers design information products to meet user needs, but they typically don’t understand information as well as users. This slideshow explains that there information-centered practices and processes complement user-centered design approaches and gives some examples.